Georgia (23 page)

A
FTER THREE MONTHS
away, I return in September with over thirty paintings—landscapes, crosses, flowers.

“Every day was full of color,” I say to him as we look at my work one evening, his arm around my shoulders. We sit together on the couch, turning the pages of my sketchbook filled with drawings of iris and freesia, a tree near Bear Lake, and sketch after sketch of the hills.

I tell him how once when I was driving across the sage, I watched the sky change, the low line of storm clouds gathered and began to race.

“And I raced that storm all the way back to the house,” I say.

“Did you win?”

“Almost.”

He laughs.

“After rain out there, Alfred, the trees are huge and black and soft. You must come with me the next time I go.”

“Isn't that always how trees look after rain?”

I shake my head. “Out there it's different. Everything there is different.” I show him the paintings I made at Bear Lake. I loved how the long pure line of the light reflecting off the lake made it feel solid. The mountains rose and fell like waves around it. There was snow along the ridge.

“I found an enormous dead silver tree there,” I tell Stieglitz, “that had fallen across another. I climbed up onto it, and found a seat, and I rested my feet in a crook of a branch. It was a queer place to sit”—I laugh—“but exactly right for a queer sort of woman like me.” And even as I say it, I realize that for every wrong thing that has passed between us these last years, he is the one person I could explain this to.

He photographs me wrapped in the black-and-white-striped Navajo blanket, and then framed by the shanty window, holding a cow skull I shipped back, my fingers splayed along the jaw.

He's been practicing his flying, and he takes me up in a little rental plane. We soar over the lake, the pressure of the wind shudders against the plane's body, and through the window I pick out the tiny curving shape of the road, houses so small against the varying tones of color that mark the hills and woods and fields. Sunlight scatters on the lake below, the shadow of our plane plows across the surface, and we are happy. He is loving, sweet and calm, listening to my stories and telling me how he's been reading Santayana and how, a week before he came back, he beat his own record at mini golf by three points.

It is like every other fall at the Lake. I paint. He proofs his photographs. We pack our things to go back to the city.

The day before we leave, I find the letter. From his niece Elizabeth—always the confidante, the one who can be trusted—to her beloved uncle Alfred.
Don't forget to register Mrs. N's letters to us, when you feel the time has come—We will keep them for you carefully—till you have worked your way through this tangle
.

I feel a faint dark crush.

Elizabeth told me what a wreck he was last summer when I was gone—how terrified he was that he would lose me from his life forever; how he tried to assuage the desperation by telling that old story of how we met—our predestined passion. She told me how he confided in her that when I was absent from the Lake, he could not get past the sense that everything familiar was turned inside out, into a kind of hell.

And all along, Elizabeth has been keeping his secret, safeguarding his letters to Mrs. Norman, so I would not discover them. All along, this other thing—this dalliance, their affair—has continued.

Such an arrogant trait—how he insists on holding on to certain pieces of correspondence for posterity, some library or museum, even while he burned so much last summer when I was gone. How much better off we'd be if he could learn to burn a thing like this.

I consider walking upstairs to our bedroom where he's resting to ask what exactly was in those letters that they're worth this kind of lie. He'll only deny it, or turn it back around on me. If this is the muck he wants to play in, I'm not going to fight him.

I fold the letter and put it back with the others where I found it. Close the drawer.

I
STILL PLAY
hostess when we have parties at the Shelton, but I've begun to move in a circle of new friends, including artists I met in Taos. I have dinner with Claudie and Ida when they have evenings off from work. I go to concerts and salons with the troika of Stettheimer sisters: Ettie the novelist in her red wigs and brocades, Florine the painter, and Carrie the elegant dollhouse designer who plans extravagant meals that last long past midnight. Her infamous “feather soup” is all the rage.

I only go to An American Place to hang the shows. Apart from that, I am rarely there. For my January show, I mix the Jacks among my abstractions, my adobe churches and gray sandhills, the red landscapes beyond Abiquiu.

I
'M GOING BACK
to New Mexico two months early this year, I tell him. I'll leave in April.

“There's too much here to do,” he complains.

“I'll do it before I go.”

He does not answer. He wants me to sort through all the works by his artists that he has in storage, to determine what will stay in storage, what will go to the Place, and what will be returned to the artists. I work five long days at the warehouse, and then it is done.

T
HAT SPRING,
I
rent a cottage on Marie Garland's ranch in Alcalde, looking out across the plains toward the dusty blue shapes of the Jemez Mountains, the starkly brilliant sky. Within a week, I've met myself again.

Day after day, it is the desolation of this country that enthralls me. How the wind sweeps the light and throws it into vibrant shifting patterns of color and shadow against the cliffs. I breathe. My mind loosens like a fist and empties. I do not think of him. I drive, I walk, I paint, and I am not the woman that he made.

I
MAKE THE
Model A into a studio to take out on the land. I loosen the bolts, swivel the front seat around, and prop my canvas on the reversed front seat. I sit in the back and paint. Even the thirty-by-forty canvases fit. Light pours through the window.

One morning, I drive out from Alcalde toward Abiuqiu, then farther north, a stretch I drove last year that says something to me: pale sandstone spires and black mesas. The road twists, rising higher, then widens onto a high plateau.

I paint the distance. Not a shape inside it, not a mountain or church or cross. Just distance. Line after line of horizon. Raw sienna, burnt umber, ocher, gold—the colors leave my brush, becoming light-struck dirt.

There's a timelessness to how the light here washes over the land. As I work, the air begins to beat, years condensed to an instant, tones of sky and earth blend. How easy it becomes then to strip the details from what I see—trees and rocks and brush and sage—so all that exists are long unified forms of sky and land, and the sense of my mind rushing in. Hours pass, lips dry, a fine dust on my cheeks, shoes soaked in it, as my brush sweeps over the canvas. A thin white line far off, just glimpsed, that might be a reflection on water or an answer—rarefied light outside of time.

After dinner that night, I sort through my finds: flowers, rocks, bones, clumps of fossilized mussel shells, hundreds of thousands of years old, still with a dark blue trace of the sea. With a rag I clean a massive ram's skull, wiping grit from the eye sockets. I run my fingers over the dry flat planes of the surface, rough and gray around the corners. His pile of letters at the other end of the table seems weightless against the skull.

I go outside to lie on the bench and look up through the maze of branches to the stars. There's a kind of ecstasy in the night here. You cannot escape it, the sense of some hidden thing folded into the sheets of space, some identity, ancient and raw, moving under what appears to be dead.

I
WRAP UP
my paintings in early July. I pack the bones into a barrel and send them off, addressed to myself in Lake George. I send a separate letter to Stieglitz,
Please do Not open my packages when they come.

Several weeks from now, I'll pry off the barrel lid, and he will watch, askance, still fuming from the sixteen-dollar freight charge, as bits of the desert and dirt crumble onto the floor.

L
ESS THAN A
week at the Lake. I shouldn't have come back.

Heat. Low sky. The green close, smothering. Everything feels foreign and, at the same time, nothing has changed. Stieglitzian bickering, clutter, and chatter; the back-and-forth swish of Sel's skirts; the watermelon-sticky hands of the children; Elizabeth's sweetness that I no longer trust. His absent smile. When the mail comes, he flips through the stack of envelopes until he finds the one he's looking for and pockets it.

One hot afternoon painting in the shanty, I strip off my clothes. Sweat rises on my skin as I paint off a sketch of one of my skulls with two white cloth roses—those deathless flowers they use out in the Southwest to decorate the graves. It's oddly in balance, the severe whiteness of the bone and the pale calico of the flowers.

A chirp by the window. I glance up. Through the haze of light, giggling voices, then little hands on the sill. The younger one's head pokes up, her hair in two braids, paint on her face decorated in some very lopsided way, peering in. With three strides I'm across the room. I throw open the door, so angry I don't care that I'm naked, chasing after them with a paintbrush as they stumble away, dressed up as Indians in ridiculous fringed chintz leggings.

Back in the shanty, I latch the door. The heat is unbearable, everything just feels so impossible to do or undo. I shut my eyes and turn inward. Even my mind seems airless.

T
HAT EVENING AT
supper, Elizabeth apologizes profusely for the children's interruption, then remarks with a coy Elizabeth smile that her daughters and their cousins talked for the rest of the day about how I was as magnificent as a goddess swooping after them, black hair streaming out, brandishing a paintbrush.

“They're quite sneaky,” I say lightly. “It seems they've been well trained.” I see her face flush. The phone rings. Stieglitz springs from the room. “Oh, you!” Then he turns the corner, lower tones, the words indistinct.

A wave of disgust sweeps through me. It's one thing to live in the thick of his foolishness, but another thing to be made a public fool. The others look away, all except Elizabeth—her eyes are back on me now, level, knowing everything. I want to smack that look right off her face. I get up, drop my napkin near my plate, and walk outside.

I
CONFRONT HIM
later upstairs.

“I'm sick of this lie, Stieglitz.”

“What?”

“And how you make such a show of it—your stupid business with that stupid woman.”

“You're talking about Mrs. Norman.”

“No. About how you lie and deny it and rub my nose in it all at the same time.”

“She is our gallery manager.”

“
Your
gallery.”

“Where your work is sold.”

“Maybe there's another place I should think about selling it.”

Silence then. The bedroom—our bedroom—feels tight and small, the twin beds pushed apart now. Paint chipped on the windowsill.

He sighs. “I need you to listen.”

“I don't want to listen anymore.”

“Georgia, you must try to see things from my viewpoint. If I did not have Mrs. Norman's help with the gallery, the gallery could not exist. I am not young, and the world cares little for art, and has less than that to spend on it. We've been fortunate, you and I, and we have worked hard, but I no longer have the energy to manage every detail on my own. If it were not for Mrs. Norman, we would not have a gallery for your art, and worse, I would hang on you every minute. I would try to keep you from your Southwest, your solitude, your work, everything you need.”

Through the window behind him, the dusk streams over the trees. My fault again. That's what he is saying.

“You think you know what I need?” I say.

“You consider Mrs. Norman trivial. You've never extended an ounce of kindness or consideration toward her.”

“Why should I?”

“Because she, her presence and fundraising, the work she does, supports your art.”

“I don't need her support.”

“She's integrally important to the day-to-day management of the gallery.”

“And personally important to you.”

“The way some things are important to you.”

“It's not the same.”

“When you imply I do a terrible thing because of my affection for Mrs. Norman, you do not include the fact that you have many desires. There's much you want to see and do, places you want to go. And you
must
do these things. You must be free to go away and I try to encourage your going, as hard as it is for me to have you gone, because I know that when you are happy and free, you are radiant. You are clear and sure of self, in your person and your art. No one is more radiant. And I want that for you. And I will be here always when you return. I'll miss you when you're gone, but it is bearable.”

I look at him squarely. “Don't pretend it's the same. You could go with me to Maine, or to New Mexico. You could take part in what matters to me. What part do
I
play in your affection for that woman? You've chosen something designed to run me down—”

“There's no design,” he interrupts.

I look at him. His eyes meet mine, blank. Not cold. Not anything. He goes on, “I'm only trying to tell you how I see this. Lately, there's been so little honest conversation between us.”

“Honest? What a strange word to use.” He stares at me, and I suddenly realize he thinks that
she
is what's happened to us. “It's the lie that I hate.”

“There is no lie.”

“The lies and the backhanded scheming—I can't live in it.”

His face crumples. “I don't want this hardness.”

“This isn't my doing.”

“You don't understand, Georgia, what your leaving does to me and you don't understand how much I want for you. I want the best for you. I've always wanted that.”

I say nothing, and we just stand there on opposite sides of the room.

“Lie down with me,” he says.

It's an awful feeling—the feeling I have in my heart, the dark soaked inside, that ache, not for him, but for what was beautiful once.

“Please,” he says, and I cross the room and lie down with him in his little bed. He holds me, his mouth in my hair, promising that no matter what, from this point on there will be no more hardness.

“Don't say it,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because there will be.”

“No.”

“When you lie to me, I don't know who you are.”

I feel him shrink. “Our marriage—” he starts to say.

“I don't want to hear it.” This is not, and has never been, an everyday marriage. Still, I wonder how it can happen—how there is no one else who can make me feel so much, hurt me so much or fill me so much, crack me open and make me feel so intensely and terribly alive, and sometimes when I see it like that, I can almost believe that in some separate and essential place, everything good between us—art, soul, a passion so vast—might still exist.

He touches my waist. Tentative now, almost wistful—the way he runs his hand along my body. “So beautiful,” he says, that old wonder in his voice. He looks at me then, his dark eyes meeting mine, and I know what he is asking.

I almost say no, but I want to remember. I want to be in that kind of moment again, that way, only a body under his eyes—no matter how altered our life is from what it was once.

It will be beautiful. I know this even as the shutter clicks. It will be an image that I love. Down to the faint galaxy of scars on my breast. She is a country, the woman in the photographs, she is neither young nor old to him. Solely and inimitably female.